this week in literature

SCOTLAND WEEK 2013

David Eustace’s captivating “Highland Heart” exhibit will be on view at Hudson Studios April 5-7 (© David Eustace)

SCOTLAND WEEK / TARTAN WEEK
Multiple venues
Through April 21
www.scotland.org
www.scotlandshop.com

The sixth annual Scotland Week, also known as Tartan Week, kicks into high gear this weekend, celebrating Scottish art and culture with a diverse group of events taking place all over the city. On Friday, former minesweeper and prison guard David Eustace will unveil a new collection of photographs, “Highland Heart,” stunning black-and-white images of the Western Islands, at Hudson Studios in Chelsea. On Saturday morning at 8:00, some ten thousand people are expected to take part in the 10K Scotland Run in Central Park, followed by the Kirkin o’ the Tartan and Pre-Parade Brunch at the Church of Our Saviour and the Tartan Day Parade, which will make its way up Sixth Ave. from Forty-Fifth to Fifty-Fifth Sts. with bagpipers, Scottish clans, music groups, Scottish terriers, and more. On Saturday night, the Caledonia Collective at Webster Hall will consist of Stanley Odd, Rachel Sermanni with Louis Abbott of Admiral Fallow, and Breabach. Stanley Odd will also share a bill with the View Saturday night at the Knitting Factory and Sunday night at Bowery Ballroom. On April 7, Alan Cumming begins a three-month Broadway run starring as the title character in the one-man National Theatre of Scotland production of Macbeth, set in a mental ward. On April 8, Scottish fashion will be on display at “From Scotland with Love: The Scottish Lion Meets the Asian Dragon,” a cocktail party and fashion show at Stage 48. On April 9, Ian Gow, curator of the National Trust for Scotland, will receive the Great Scot Award at the black-tie “Celebration of Scotland’s Treasures” dinner at the Metropolitan Club. On April 12, Ken Loach’s Cannes Jury Prize winner The Angels’ Share opens at Lincoln Plaza and the Landmark Sunshine. And on April 14, the Scottish Ensemble, a string orchestra highlighted by trumpeter Alison Balsom, will perform at Town Hall with a program that includes the U.S. premiere of James MacMillan’s “Seraph.” A h-uile la sona dhuibh ’s gun la idir dona dhuibh!

BEN KATCHOR: HAND-DRYING IN AMERICA AND OTHER STORIES

“Cole Pepser’s Bedroom” is one of many marvelous Ben Katchor strips that combine unique, old-fashioned characters and a changing consumer culture amid urban environments (© 2013 by Ben Katchor)

HAND-DRYING IN AMERICA AND OTHER STORIES (Pantheon, March 2013, $29.95)
Monday, April 1, NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium, Parsons the New School, 2 West 13th St., Bark Room, 7:00
Saturday, April 6, MoCCA Arts Festival, 69th Regiment Armory, 68 Lexington Ave. at 26th St. festival admission $12-$15
Monday, April 15, Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St., Brooklyn, free, 7:30
www.katchor.com

In a March 2011 twi-ny talk, we asked Brooklyn-born cartoonist Ben Katchor whether he was afraid the physical book might be disappearing from the American landscape, and he responded, “Physical books will be around for a long time — I see them used as window and door props, and as structures to support laptop computers.” At that time, Katchor was promoting his first book in more than ten years, the graphic novel The Cardboard Valise, which came with a handle so you could carry it like a piece of luggage. For his latest book, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories, Katchor has created an even larger, heavier hardcover without the handle, making it almost impossible to carry around, but it is no mere doorstop. Hand-Drying is a marvelous collection of more than 150 strips Katchor has drawn for Metropolis magazine, inventive and funny cartoons filled with the trademark old-fashioned characters, absurdist situations, and unusual city environments that Katchor has been detailing for several decades in such previous books as Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay, The Jew of New York, and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District. In Hand-Drying, Katchor continues his exploration of disappearing elements of modern urban living, from architecture and design to advertising and consumer products — including books.

In the front endpaper, investigative reporter Josef Fuss researches the severe environmental costs involved in the publishing process: “Each book is a minor ecological disaster,” he says to himself. In “The Tragic History of the Oversized Magazine,” Katchor is referencing Hand-Drying itself, tracing the development of large-scale magazines, explaining, “Their destiny is linked to the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, the porterhouse steak, the zoot suit and other material excesses of history.” In the last word bubble, a man holds a magazine that nearly matches his own size, proclaiming, “Wow, look at this spread!” Readers will be repeating those words over and over as they turn the pages of Hand-Drying, which features such other knockout tales as “Open House Season,” which follows people who are obsessed with visiting open houses even though they are not looking for a new apartment; “The Committee for Architectural Neglect,” in which a group of officials “see no reason for a building to relive its glorious past”; “2nd Thought Mail,” in which a company sets up a ten-day waiting period in case letter writers don’t want to send that missive after all (a fabulous take on that feeling one gets when instantly regretting sending an e-mail that can’t be recalled); and “Contiguous Control,” in which a man ends up in the hospital after refusing to use the remote control. “Who turns the pages of your books?” he asks his son.

But Katchor is no mere crank complaining of the failings of our modern, techno-driven, instant-gratification society, lamenting the passing of the days of getting up and walking to the television set to change the channel, friendly gas-station attendants who would engage customers in small talk while working the pump, and drying one’s hands with paper towels in rest rooms instead of having to use loud, abrasive hand-drying machines. Instead, he celebrates the unique and unusual in the past, present, and future, visualizing a fascinating societal underground that still exists in the nooks and crannies of our daily existence. In the back endpapers, freelance Chinese journalist Fallo Yank disputes Fuss’s findings, determining that “literary and coffee-table books account for an insignificant portion of the world’s print pollution,” that the real problem is the content of the books, including “a deluxe full-color edition of an esoteric literary comic strip.” Hand-Drying in America is no mere window or door prop but rather an endlessly entertaining and extremely funny and insightful look at human nature and our changing world as only Katchor can depict it. The self-deprecating cartoonist will be participating in a conversation with Gil Roth, host of “The Virtual Memories Show,” at the thirty-eighth meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium on April 1 at 7:30 at Parsons the New School, will be signing copies of his books at the Pantheon booth at the MoCCA Arts Festival on April 6 at the 69th Regiment Armory, and will take part in an illustrated discussion with writer Nicholas Dawidoff at the Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn on April 15 at 7:30.

NYC TEEN AUTHOR FESTIVAL

Nova Ren Suma will be celebrating the release of her second YA novel at this weekend's Teen Fair

Nova Ren Suma will be celebrating the release of her second YA novel at this weekend’s free NYC Teen Author Festival

The free NYC Teen Author Festival kicks into full swing this weekend with numerous special events featuring many of the best YA authors in the business. On Friday at 2:00 at the New York Public Library’s second-floor Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Ted Goeglein, Gordon Korman, Lucas Klauss, and Michael Northrop will take on Susane Colasanti, E. Lockhart, Carolyn Mackler, Sarah Mlynowski, and Leila Sales in a “He Said, She Said” battle moderated by David Levithan, part of an afternoon symposium that continues at 3:00 with “Taking a Turn: YA Characters Dealing with Bad and Unexpected Choices,” with Caela Carter, Eireann Corrigan, Alissa Grosso, Terra Elan McVoy, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Elizabeth Scott, and K. M. Walton, moderated by Aaron Hartzler; at 4:10 with “That’s So Nineteenth Century,” with Sharon Cameron, Leanna Renee Hieber, Stephanie Strohm, and Suzanne Weyn, moderated by Sarah Beth Durst; and concluding at 4:40 with “Alternate World vs. Imaginary World,” with Durst, Jeff Hirsch, Emmy Laybourne, Lauren Miller, E. C. Myers, Diana Peterfreund, and Mary Thompson, moderated by Chris Shoemaker. Following that, a bunch of authors will be signing books at the Union Square B&N, from 7:00 to 8:30, including Corrigan, Elizabeth Eulberg, Hirsch, Levithan, Rainbow Rowell, and Nova Ren Suma. Saturday’s symposium in the Berger Forum begins at 1:00 with “Defying Description: Tackling the Many Facets of Identity in YA,” with Marissa Calin, Emily Danforth, Hartzler, A. S. King, and Jacqueline Woodson, moderated by Levithan, followed at 2:10 by a New Voices Spotlight featuring J. J. Howard, Kimberly Sabatini, Tiffany Schmidt, and Greg Takoudes; at 2:40 by “Under Many Influences: Shaping Identity When You’re a Teen Girl,” with Jen Calonita, Deborah Heiligman, Hilary Weisman Graham, Kody Keplinger, Amy Spalding, Katie Sise, and Kathryn Williams, moderated by Terra Elan McVoy; at 3:40 by “Born This Way: Nature, Nurture, and Paranormalcy,” with Jessica Brody, Gina Damico, Maya Gold, Alexandra Monir, Lindsay Ribar, Jeri Smith-Ready, and Jessica Spotswood, moderated by Adrienne Maria Vrettos; and at 4:20 by “The Next Big Thing,” with Jocelyn Davies, Hieber, Barry Lyga, and Maryrose Wood. From 7:00 to 8:30, there will be a Mutual Admiration Society reading at McNally Jackson on Prince St. consisting of Cameron, King, Northrop, Peterfreund, Victoria Schwab, and Suma, hosted by Levithan. And on Sunday, the weeklong festival comes to a close with nearly fifty YA authors taking part in “Our No-Foolin’ Mega-Signing” at Books of Wonder from 1:00 to 4:00, a smorgasbord of talent divided into forty-five-minute groups at 1:00, 1:45, 2:30, and 3:15.

THE LOST WEEKEND

Would-be writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland) battles his demons in Billy Wilder classic, THE LOST WEEKEND

THE LOST WEEKEND (Billy Wilder, 1945)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Monday, March 18, $12.50, 7:25
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Ray Milland won an Oscar as Best Actor for his unforgettable portrayal of Don Birnam in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, starring as a would-be writer who can see life only through the bottom of a bottle. Having just gotten sober, he is off to spend the weekend with his brother (Phillip Terry), but Don is able to slip away from his girlfriend, Helen (Jane Wyman), and his sibling and hang out mostly with Nat the bartender (Howard Da Silva) and plenty of inner demons. One of the misunderstood claims to fame of Wilder’s classic drama is that it was shot in P. J. Clarke’s on Third Ave.; although the bar in the film was based on Clarke’s, the set was re-created in Hollywood, which doesn’t take anything away from this heartbreaking tale that will not have you running to the nearest watering hole after you see it. The Lost Weekend, which won three other Academy Awards — Best Screenplay (Wilder and Charles Brackett), Best Director (Wilder), and Best Picture — is screening March 18 at 7:25 at Film Forum and will be introduced by Blake Bailey, author of the new biography Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson (Knopf, March 13, 2013, $30), about the author of such books as The Lost Weekend and The Fall of Valor, and will be followed by a book signing. Bailey, who has also written biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates, is currently working on a major bio of Philip Roth; the new documentary Philip Roth: Unmasked, will be playing at Film Forum for free March 13-19.

TWI-NY TALK: MARC SPITZ

Music journalist and playwright Marc Spitz examines his wild years in new memoir

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
126 Crosby St. between Houston & Prince Sts.
Monday, March 18, free, 7:00
212-334-3324
www.housingworks.org
www.marcspitz.com

“I didn’t know how to be undamaged,” music journalist and playwright Marc Spitz admits near the end of his latest book, Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York in the ’90s (Da Capo, February 2013, $15.99). In his brutally honest autobiography, Spitz delves into his early dreams of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, a life he got to live out, experiencing dazzling highs as well as dirt-bottom lows as he partied with the best of them, from up-and-coming musicians to legendary stars. Spitz, who was born in Far Rockaway and raised in the Five Towns, wrote more than a dozen cover stories for Spin magazine, spending time with such seminal groups as the Pixies, the Strokes, the White Stripes, and Weezer. He has also penned books on Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Green Day, and the L.A. punk scene; published a pair of novels: How Soon Is Never?, in which a character is obsessed with Morrissey and the Smiths, andToo Much Too Late, about a fictional garage band named the Jane Ashers; and has written a dozen plays, including Retail Sluts, Your Face Is a Mess, The Hobo Got Too High, and “. . . Worry, Baby.” Poseur is a special treat for people who, like the author, came of age on Long Island and in Manhattan during the 1980s and ’90s, as Spitz writes about the Green Acres Mall, the Lynbrook movie theater, the Chelsea Hotel, the Kitchen, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, Don Hill’s, the Slipper Room, and other haunts. On March 18, he will be at Housing Works, reading from Poseur and participating in a conversation with his friend and colleague Chuck Klosterman.

twi-ny: Like you, I grew up in and around the Five Towns area and couldn’t wait to start hanging out in the city. Many of my friends still live out there. What is it about Wrong Island, as you call it in the book, that makes some people want to escape and others settle in?

Marc Spitz: I should say that today, in my early forties, I have such an affection for that area, and realize how much I took the safety and comfort for granted. But as a kid, you just can’t work through the restlessness. And it feels like absolute torture to know that the city is so close. You could get there in less time than it took to watch an episode of Dynasty. It’s one thing to grow up in Ohio or Michigan and pine and plan for Manhattan, but it’s quite another to see it and smell it on a regular basis and not be able to have it for very long. Even when I would cut class and spend the day there, I was always keeping an eye on the watch and the train schedule in my head. The Five Towns just seemed so small. All five of them put together didn’t add up to St. Marks Place for me then. But again, this is someone who now Googles Bea’s Tea Room or Mother Kelly’s in the middle of the night. I think Bea’s is gone now. Have you ever had the macaroni salad from Bea’s? I don’t know what they put in it but it’s become mythical among Five Towners, the side-order equivalent of a unicorn or a mermaid, and I’ve been searching for it ever since, obsessed like Eugene Levy in Splash.

twi-ny: You’ve interviewed many of the biggest rock stars in the world, writing magazine articles and books, but with Poseur, you’re now, in essence, interviewing yourself. Was that hard to do?

Marc Spitz: Yes, I’d rather interview a hundred rock stars than, say, my mom, who I interviewed for Poseur. Or spend time with my own journals and notes and old (bad) writing. I think you have to live in the past quite literally to do a memoir, and I certainly had to drop out a bit. No more bar hopping or dating. I turned forty and just figured it was time. I was also fueled by a certain sense of cause. Like I really wanted to snatch the NYC myth away from these ’60s and ’70s folks who’ve been dining out on their NYC for far too long. Who is to say that their NYC, even with Warhol and CBGBs, was more valid than mine. They won’t get out of the way unless you push them, you know? “Yeah, great. Max’s Kansas City . . .” What about Max Fish, guy? Of course, I was totally in love and inspired by the ’60s and ’70s NYC as a kid and tried to emulate it when I first moved here in the late ’80s. Staying at the Chelsea and all. That’s fine and good when you’re a teen or in your twenties, but into your forties you kind of hunger for your own sense of historical placement, and like I said, sometimes you have to just take it. So while it was difficult and unpleasant and at times just plain sad to go there, interview wise or mind-set wise, I felt like it was necessary.

twi-ny: In Poseur, you write, “When you finish a book, it doesn’t matter if it never gets published; it doesn’t matter if it even gets read by another human being not obligated to read it, like a girlfriend or a thesis tutor. You change. You are not the same. Whether or not the book is any good doesn’t matter. You are better.” Did finishing this memoir feel any different from finishing your previous books or plays?

Marc Spitz: I only recently realized it was over. Like when it was out. The day after the book party, I was hung over and sort of a roach with the lights suddenly on scurrying blindly. Not sure where to go, but it was good. For nearly three years, I’ve had such a sense of purpose and direction, all of it, or the majority of it, anchored to this thing. And suddenly it’s just . . . on sale. You’re a ranking number on Amazon . . . and not a very high one. There’s no earthquake. No explosion. No rapture. Not even the Rapture. But in a way, while the closure is always anticlimactic, and the more personal the book, the more painful that anticlimax can feel (totally overshadowing any triumphs such as being asked to do an interview like this one), it has to happen, especially if you want to be prolific. I want to write a lot of books. I have a deadline for my next one and an idea for the one after that. And a new play. So . . . you know, you can’t linger. The feeling of it being done is no different from the feeling of the first book being done. It’s like President Bartlett says: “What’s next?” After the good, long bender anyway. . . .

twi-ny: A few months ago, a copy of Esquire arrived in my mailbox, replacing Spin, which ended its print version in the fall. You wrote for Spin for many years, including more than a dozen cover stories; how did you react to the news of the print magazine’s demise? Did it surprise you?

Marc Spitz: I made my break with Spin emotionally a long time ago, probably before I even left in 2006. It was fairly obvious where things were heading and it was not a good prognosis. So it’s like when you hear the news that a lifelong junkie finally overdoses. You’re not at all surprised but you’re still shaken for some reason. I got Car and Driver, by the way, not Esquire. I actually read Esquire. It’s tricky to talk about this because I still have old friends and coworkers who are employed by Spin and working hard on the website (even though they have not covered Poseur at all . . . despite about a hundred pages of Spin-related memories . . . but it’s not like Boston’s a big college town). Part of me hopes they keep the brand going and part of me wishes it would just bow out gracefully and not be part of some giant web conglomerate’s Ken-Taco-Hut. But I am not proprietary about Spin’s legacy. I remember people grousing about “the good old Guccione days,” which I totally missed. I was part of the new guard coming in after he sold it. It’s human nature to kvetch about such changes, especially if you’re genuinely moved by them, so I will just say . . . “badly.” And “no.”

twi-ny: Since you began writing, music journalism has changed significantly; now just about anyone can consider themselves a critic by starting a blog, writing a few words, and uploading a photo or a video. Do you think that’s been good or bad for the music industry in general and music journalism specifically?

Marc Spitz: Yeah, I was talking to my ex the other day, Lizzy Goodman, who is also a music writer and I said, “Wow, did we pick a shitty career.” And she said, “Well, you made it look like it was a good choice.” Which was both flattering and made me feel guilty. I think in order to get pieces that win awards and change lives and keep the art of rock writing going, you need to spend time and money. I toured with bands. I traveled across the country and the planet and what I filed had all that flavor. It seems like now it’s like, “Wiz Khalifa came by the office . . .” which is, you know, a hub with a bunch of laptops and it’s posted for people that night. Which is the market. You can’t argue with the market. It’s what people want. But it’s not going to spit out another Lester Bangs or Julie Burchill any time soon. It’s just information now. Photos and files and 250 blips of text. As far as the music industry, I don’t really know. I just heard that record sales are up for the first time in a decade. That can’t be all Adele, can it? Is it? It is? OK. I have to go back to my trash can now.

twi-ny: On March 18, you’ll be at Housing Works in conversation with Chuck Klosterman. In the book, you write, “Chuck was good. It would have been so much easier if he were a fraud. I decided the thing to do was to kill him.” Have you and Chuck remained friends over the years? Do you still get those kinds of jealousy fantasies?

Marc Spitz: We have remained friends. We have a drink once or twice a year, and I always enjoy his company. I read his books. He reads mine. I’ve been lucky to do this during a time when you really had a sense of your peers, whether it was Chuck or people like Chris Norris when I was at Spin or Rob Sheffield, who is both another old friend now and also a genius writer; the very best at what he does and a voice you can’t imitate. I don’t know that people filing the above-mentioned text blips have that sense of Beatles/Stones/Beach Boys late ’60s competition thing, which we all definitely felt. If someone wrote a killer feature, your next one had to just blow the doors off theirs and vice verse. Blow the bloody doors off! It looks like my career is winding down and I will never get to do a U2 cover story and Sia Michel — our then-boss gave Klosterman that one – but otherwise we’re cool. Better than cool. The Housing Works thing, by the way, was something he offered. I didn’t ask him to do it. That’s the kind of guy he his, very generous and curious and with a good perspective on his (maddening . . . just kidding) success.

TWI-NY TALK: SPRAGUE THEOBALD

Sprague Theobald (photo by Rod Millington)

Sprague Theobald details his family’s treacherous journey to the Northwest Passage in new book and film (photo by Rod Millington)

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ICE (Sprague Theobald, 2013)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 8-14
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.spraguetheobald.com

On June 16, 2009, author, sailor, and filmmaker Sprague Theobald boarded the 325-horsepower, 57-foot-long Bagan and took off for the Northwest Passage with a small crew that included his son, Sefton, his stepson, Chauncey Tanton, his stepdaughter, Dominique Tanton, and her boyfriend, Clinton Bolton, setting sail on a journey that few have attempted and fewer have survived. “The Northwest Passage is a ship killer, and always has been,” Theobald writes in The Other Side of the Ice: One Family’s Treacherous Journey Negotiating the Northwest Passage (Skyhorse Publishing, August 2012, $24.95; ebook available from Antenna Books, $9.99), which details the trials and tribulations he and his family experienced on the open seas. “At various stages of the journey, I found myself numb. Exhausted. Terrified. How had it all started? What were we doing?” A transatlantic racer, Theobald, who has previously written the novel The Reach and won an Emmy for his America’s Cup documentary The 25th Defense: End of an Era, explains exactly what they were doing, warts and all, in the book and its companion film, also called The Other Side of the Ice, a production of his Hole in the Wall team, which is a self-described “consortium of renegades, misfits, and malcontents intent on bettering the world through the art of film and storytelling.” The Other Side of the Ice will be playing at the Quad from March 8 to 14, and Theobald will be at the theater to discuss the film and sign copies of the book following the 7:30 screenings on March 8 and 9 and after the 5:30 show on March 10. But first Theobald discussed the book, the film, and the state of his family in our latest twi-ny talk.

twi-ny: You begin both the book and the film by wondering whether you were in essence risking the lives of your family in order to accomplish this personal mission of sailing through the Northwest Passage. If you knew then what you know now, would you still go ahead with the trip?

Sprague Theobald: Knowing what I know now, I would certainly still go ahead with the trip but with a better sense of how deep and deliberating the extreme Arctic isolation can be, the hell it can raise on your thinking if not your soul. This I wasn’t prepared for.

twi-ny: What would you change if you had it to do all over again?

Sprague Theobald: If I had it to do all over again I would have spent a bit more time vetting the captain, who I was assured “could handle anything.” As it was he fell mentally and fell hard. I hired him so that I could concentrate on the documentary, but in the end I had to toss him off the boat and bring the boat, with the great help of my three children, to Seattle through three thousand miles of some of the world’s most torturous weather.

twi-ny: When the Bagan was stuck in the ice with nowhere to go, did you always think you’d eventually make it, or were there moments when you truly felt that you would join other Northwest Passage crews who were never seen or heard from again?

Sprague Theobald: While stuck in the ice and at one point alone in my cabin I thought, Jesus . . . I’ve missed the headline on this trip. All the while I thought it was going to be “Family Successfully Transits the Northwest Passage,” but instead the real headline is now, “Father Leads Children to Death Trying to Transit the Northwest Passage.” This was as real as real could be. I had to battle this thought and image, plus many more, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. I thought, Yes, the odds looked incredibly against us, but the only way to find out was to, if physically possible, continue to put one foot in front of the other and see where this takes us. I did my very best to keep these thoughts to myself and not share them with the kids. It was a pressure that, as I explain in the book and show in the documentary, I’d never before known and didn’t know if I could survive.

twi-ny: There were 280 hours of footage that were edited into a 77-minute film, and there was a four-month trip edited into a 220-page book. Which task did you ultimately find most challenging, making the film or writing the book? Did you make a conscious decision to save certain moments for the film and specific other ones for the book?

the other side of the ice

Sprague Theobald: No, I didn’t make a conscious decision to save “this” for the book or “that” for the film. What I did have to do, though, was go back through my personal journal, which, once the trip was over, I prayed I’d never have to look at again. After Herzog made Fitzcarraldo, he was too terrified to look at his personal journal for twenty-eight years. By no means do I compare myself to him, but I do understand the power and terror these raw words, written when all seemed lost, can carry.

twi-ny: In the book you write, “On very rare occasions, if you’re very lucky, you get a chance to look into someone’s heart and character.” What did you learn about your own heart and character on the journey?

Sprague Theobald: I found out that I am simply human, no more, no less. That if one gets too close to hubris, in any sense of the word, the stakes become extreme, the flame more powerful and hotter than anything imaginable in this world.

twi-ny: What did you find out about your family’s heart and character that most surprised you?

Sprague Theobald: I found out that my family’s heart is as strong as I had ever dreamt for it, wished for it to be, if not stronger. Their sense of commitment and total lack of selflessness, when one of them around them was demonstrating just the opposite, was a gift greater than I ever expected to be given.

twi-ny: Have the bonds that developed with your kids on the boat continued?

Sprague Theobald: Big time. It’s not to say that we’re in touch more often or that we call and have long talks over the phone any more than we did but that when we do get together the laughter and joy come from a base and foundation of the deepest respect and love. We now know what’s petty and what isn’t.

twi-ny: Now that the book has been published and the film is being released, are you getting the itch to travel again?

Sprague Theobald: This has kept me busy every single hour of every single day since we landed in Seattle on November 6, 2009. I truly haven’t had a day off in over five years. From time to time, though, I do daydream about talking a kayak from the headwaters of the Connecticut River up in Canada to where it terminates in the Atlantic, the Long Island Sound. But it’s going to be a while before I play out of the backyard again.

InDIGEST PRESENTS SAM LIPSYTE AND MIKE DOUGHTY

(le) poisson rouge
158 Bleecker St.
Friday, March 8, $12-$15, 7:30
www.lepoissonrouge.com
www.indigestmag.com

“The sign in the Sweet Apple kitchen declared it a nut-free zone, and every September somebody, almost always a dad, cracked the usual stupid joke,” begins “The Climber Room,” the first of thirteen stories in Sam Lipsyte’s new collection, The Fun Parts (FSG, March 5, 2013, $24). “The gag, Laura, the school director, told Tovah, would either mock the school’s concern for potentially lethal legumes or else suggest that despite the sign’s assurance, not everyone at Sweet Apple could boast of sanity.” Indeed, throughout his career, native New Yorker Lipsyte has featured many characters whose sanity could be debated, in such seriocomic books as The Subject Steve, The Ask, and Home Land. Lipsyte, who teaches creative writing at Columbia, once appeared in an infomercial for an exercise machine, is the son of sportswriter and young adult novelist Robert Lipsyte, and was the screaming frontman for the punk band Dungbeetle, takes a razor-sharp, cynical, and very funny knife to the foibles of modern-day America in his always entertaining writing. The bounds of sanity will be tested at (le) poisson rouge on March 8 at the official launch of The Fun Parts, which should consist of many fun parts itself as Lipsyte is joined by former New York Press columnist Mike Doughty, leader of the 1990s band Soul Coughing and author of the rock-and-roll memoir The Book of Drugs. Doughty will perform a live set, then sit down for a conversation with Lipsyte moderated by humorist Dave Hill, author of Tasteful Nudes . . . and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation. Clearly, when you put these three men together, just about anything can happen, and probably will.